Sunday, February 3, 2013

Guest Review - - That Scandalous Summer

Despite his reputation as a ladies’ man, Michael de Gray,
younger brother of the Duke of Marwick, is not the stereotypical dissolute
younger son but a physician who has spent the last decade as head of a charity
hospital that serves London’s poorest. Funded by his brother, the hospital is
as important to Michael emotionally as it is professionally. He is blindsided
when Marwick threatens to cut off all funding for the hospital and Michael’s
personal fortune as well unless Michael marries a woman who meets the duke’s
approval within the year. Marwick has been Michael’s defender, champion, and
substitute parent since they were children, but in the wake of the death of his
duchess seven months ago and the ongoing revelations of her opium addiction, infidelities,
and political betrayals, Merwick has turned into a man Michael no longer knows,
a man disturbingly like the father the brothers hated. Refusing to be
controlled by Merwick, Michael leaves London for Cornwall to become Michael
Gray, country doctor.

Elizabeth Chudderley--infamous widow, professional beauty,
and darling of London society’s fast crowd, has also retreated to Cornwall. The
news delivered by her solicitors that bad investments and careless spending
have left her unable to support the lifestyle she has enjoyed soon followed by
the man she expected to marry abandoning her for an heiress led her to close
her town house and return to her estate near the village of Brosbea for the
summer. Her only choice is to use her beauty to find a wealthy husband as
quickly as possible.

Michael and Elizabeth meet one early morning when he finds
her drunk, snoring in his rose bushes. An immediate awareness develops between
them, but Michael determines to keep his distance. He knows Mrs. Chudderley’s
reputation because she is part of the circle to which an old schoolmate, Viscount
Sanburne (Bound by Your Touch),
belongs, a group too rich and too wild for Michael. Elizabeth, unaccustomed to
men who do not respond to her invitations, thinks a flirtation with Michael,
her social inferior as a country doctor, may be just the distraction she needs.
Time will prove the decisions of both futile. Michael cannot say no to the
beautiful widow, and Elizabeth’s feelings for Michael will prove to be far more
disturbing than the light flirtation she planned. But the obstacles separating
them increase with every discovery that intensifies their feelings for one
another.

Duran has used the device of deceptive appearances before,
and she deftly employs it again in That
Scandalous Summer. There is situational irony in the deception since the
reader from the book’s beginning knows that Michael is not the humble country
doctor he appears to be, and the reader also knows that Michael’s dedication to
the patients his hospital serves is central to who he is. Merwick responds to
Michael’s rejection of the marriage scheme with this acknowledgment:

“But forgive
me if I’m not persuaded. You see, I think here of your precious patients. In
the end, you’ll concede—for their sake, if not your own.”

A few chapters later, the reader learns that Elizabeth’s
decision to marry money is not that of the shallow, self-absorbed beauty that
she seems to be.

What choice
did she have? It wasn’t simply her own welfare that hung in the balance. Everyone
who worked her land—though the value of their crops kept falling; everyone whom
she employed—and the children whose educations she funded, and the parish, and
the village school—

They are both complex characters who enlist the reader’s
sympathies and keep the reader hoping for them to find happiness together even
when that outcome appears impossible. The connection between them consists of
genuine liking and shared humor as well as healthy lust. Michael is handsome,
strong, and noble in character, but I was most impressed by his trust in
Elizabeth even when the evidence of his own senses suggests she is betraying him.
Elizabeth is intelligent, generous, and refreshingly appreciative of her looks
without being vain.

She would miss, when she was older, the way her approach
could make a man’s shoulders square, his chin lift, as though he strove to
present his tallest and best self to her. Such a delicious sense of power it
gave her!

The cast of secondary characters is strong. Fans of Bound by Your Touch will be pleased to
see Lydia’s unconventionality and scholarship are undiminished, and Sanburne is
a suitably doting spouse. Alistair, the
fifth Duke of Merwick, evokes a complicated mix of anger and pity, and the
mysterious Mather, Elizabeth’s secretary, is appealing, loyal, intriguing, and,
at times, funny. I will be disappointed if we fail to see more of both these
characters.

As always, the precision, lucidity, and sometimes lyricism of
Duran’s prose make reading her books a joy. One of my favorite passages occurs
when Elizabeth, having admitted her love for Michael, considers how different
her feelings for him are from those she entertained for the perfidious Nello.
The changing rhythm of the prose here, moving from the question to the tumble
of recognitions to the contemplative conclusion is a wonderful example of sound
and sense working together.

How had she
ever imagined herself in love with Nello? The jokes between them had been
malicious, and always at somebody else’s expense. He had excited her, of
course—and angered and annoyed her; every moment with him had been tumultuous,
and in the interludes between their meetings, she had fretted, parsing every
moment of their past interactions. But that was not love. Love, she saw now,
did not feel at all the same.

Love was more
than passion. It was built on intimacy,
a history woven of private moments, knowing looks, and silent smiles.

Such marked enthusiasm
may seem inconsistent with the 4.5 stars I gave this book, but as much as I
loved these characters and their story, I had a problem with elements in the
final chapter. The writer who chooses plots that arc over books has to strike a
perfect balance: the ending of the first book must maintain the reader’s
interest without leaving her frustrated by a lack of resolution. In the case of
the relationship between Michael and Merwick, I wanted more resolution. I was
left eager for Mather’s story, but frustrated because I needed a more definite
reconciliation between the brothers. Readers who are not bothered by
conclusions with question marks will likely have a different reaction.

If you are a fan of Duran’s intense, distinctive romances,
you will not want to miss this one. It is lighter than last year’s At Your Pleasure, but it is still a
powerful story with ample emotional punch. If you’ve never read Duran, this
first book in the Rules for the Reckless series is a good place to begin. There
is even a novella prequel, “Your Wicked Heart,” available for $.99, although it
is slighter in substance as well as length than Duran’s full-length works and
should not be used as a taste test. Also, be warned that the description of That Scandalous Summer that is all over
the Internet is misleading. The novel is not a Regency; it is set in 1885, and
it is considerably more complicated than the summary suggests.

10 comments:

Thanks so much for the review. This will be a good read. I like it when authors take a slightly different path and give their character complex personalities and situations. Life is seldom cut and dried, and good stories aren't either. I understand your frustration about the brothers' relationship. I have been waiting for over a year for the sequel of a book in a series which left everything majorly unsettled at the end. Not bad if the next book comes out in a few months, but this time it has been almost 2 years.

Thanks, Librarypat. I hope you enjoy TSS. Let's hope we don't have to wait two years for the next book in the Duran series. I'm a fan of the back-to-back series, and even a month can seem like a long wait with a really great story.

It does sound like a great story but I think I will begin at the beginning so to speak and read the prequel and At Your Pleasure first. I might even get them but keep them on the tbr pile until the next book comes out, I can sometimes control myself that long but not always...

Contact Us

We will accept galleys, advance reader copies and books for review consideration. Please contact us at theromancedish@gmail.com for mailing instructions.

We welcome your comments and questions. Please email us at theromancedish@gmail.com.

FTC DISCLAIMER

While we purchase some of the books that we review at this site, the majority of the reviews posted are of books that we have received free from authors or publishers. For purposes of FTC disclosure, visitors to our site should assume that review books have been provided to us at no cost.